WAYNE, Pa., June 13, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- SunGard Availability Services today announced Florida Hospital has subscribed to its Managed Recovery Program (MRP) service in which SunGard manages the hospital's entire recovery lifecycle. SunGard MRP has enabled the hospital to lower costs, be more confident in its recovery capabilities and reduce risk by ensuring recovery processes stay current with technology and business changes.

"We are in a heavily regulated industry and experiencing growing use of electronic medical records and clinical applications," said Carl Minear, director of information technologies, Florida Hospital. "If our IT systems are down then life-critical healthcare services may be compromised. SunGard MRP helps us effectively carry out our mission with patients."

Florida Hospital, the nation's largest healthcare provider in terms of patients seen every year in a Medicare facility, has a seven hospital campus with the largest in Orlando. Being in an area vulnerable to hurricanes has heightened the hospital's commitment to disaster preparedness.

"If there's a disaster at home that's where you want your people – not at a distant data center working on recovery. SunGard's experience gives us the confidence to keep our people back with their families and the systems that need attention. In addition to improving our applications recovery processes, SunGard MRP has helped us reduce travel costs needed to support recovery testing," said Mr. Minear.

SunGard MRP provides a cross-discipline team with experts in each area of Florida Hospital's complex network of IT systems which includes a mainframe, UNIX, Linux, WinTel and VMware environments. The SunGard team monitors the hospital's recovery scripts on an ongoing basis – keeping plans current by noting areas which have to be changed and calling out new systems that need to be added. It is led by an assigned Service Delivery Manager who works as an extension of Florida Hospital's staff on managing the recovery lifecycle.

"SunGard has provided us a strong team which knows our business and built relationships with our personnel which are vital in recovery processes," said Robert Goodman, disaster recovery coordinator, Florida Hospital. "When you are working under the stress and strain of recovery, having established, productive relationships are essential to success."

Adopting SunGard MRP is part of Florida Hospital's commitment to recovery best practices. Previously, in the aftermath of experiencing multiple hurricanes, the hospital moved from a tape-based backup system to SunGard's SAN-based replication solution. SunGard's remote replication helped Florida Hospital cut recovery process times from multiple days to just four to six hours. However, even with this improvement, Florida Hospital still found recovery too taxing on internal resources.

"We didn't have enough time or people, and the logistics were a huge strain on our IT staff. SunGard MRP works for us because SunGard has done hundreds of recoveries. That's who you want – someone who has done it, and seen where other people had problems and fixed them. Drawing on those strengths is like having a set of recovery consultants on staff," said Mr. Goodman.

About SunGard Availability ServicesSunGard Availability Services provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software. With approximately five million square feet of datacenter and operations space, SunGard Availability Services helps customers improve the resilience of their mission critical systems by designing, implementing and managing cost-effective solutions using people, process and technology to address enterprise IT availability needs. Through direct sales and channel partners, we help organizations ensure their people and customers have uninterrupted access to the information systems they need in order to do business. To learn more, visit www.sungardas.com or call 1-800-468-7483. Connect with us on Twitter,LinkedIn and Facebook.

About SunGardSunGard is one of the world's leading software and technology services companies. SunGard has more than 17,000 employees and serves approximately 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries. SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software. With annual revenue of about $4.5 billion, SunGard is the largest privately held software and services company and was ranked 480 on the Fortune 500 in 2011. For more information, please visit www.sungard.com.

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